Arcade Fire’s new music licensed to Infinite Content

Yesterday we got a new Arcade Fire song, “I Gave You Power” featuring Mavis Staples. Just as the news broke Arcade Fire changed all their social media profile photos to the picture above. I’m not sure anyone really understood what that was all about, but today (Jan 20th) the song has been made available to all streaming services and curiously its licensed to something called Infinite Content. In the past releases have been licensed to Arcade Fire Music LLC, Merge Records etc. This is definitely the first time we see something attributed to Infinite Content. The above picture is of course an infinite symbol with a copyright symbol in it, so that ought to be the connection we were looking for.

Interestingly enough Win Butler made a comment about infinite content during his Red Bull Music Academy lecture, he had this to say about it.
“If we were doing it today… The bummer about today, trying to do it today, is that when we were starting, I mentioned selling 10,000 records. That’s kind of an arbitrary number, but that was, in my mind, you could quit your day job if you sold 10,000 records and you were in a band, you could subsist. Particularly if you’re in Canada and you get a grant every once in a while to make art. That was the line, where you could be in a band, and you didn’t have to work in sandwich shop or in a call center, on the side. Which that’s the sad thing about the kind of Spotify world that we’re in. It’s that that has been completely eviscerated, that’s never coming back, it’s gone forever. Because 10,000 streams is $0.25, which 10,000 records is enough to be in a band and do it seriously. That kind of weird economy, the whole thing, that’s the really tough one for me. That’s the thing that I continue to have a problem with, with the whole model of the infinite content model that we’re in now. Which I’ll let you know when I figure that one out. I think it would be hard, but I’d like to think we would kind of just do the same thing.”